


grief, and how it fades.

by agentmaine



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 23:53:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10627809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agentmaine/pseuds/agentmaine
Summary: "The first fit of laughter after Julia’s death feels like betrayal and tastes like poison on the tongue. Your heart freezes, turns to stone, and your hand clasps over your mouth like iron. How could you?"A character study on Magnus Burnsides in relation to grief, mourning, healing, and how they're all continuous processes.





	

The first fit of laughter after Julia’s death feels like betrayal and tastes like poison on the tongue. Your heart freezes, turns to stone, and your hand clasps over your mouth like iron. _How could you?_ Mere days ago, a matter of hours ago, your world crumbled. It burned. _They_ burned. The remnants of what once was, of your fairy-tale life, were scattered to the wind and mixed with the ash and dust left behind. Your home and family were destroyed, and you are alone.

How dare you bring yourself to laugh?

Guilt washes over you in tidal waves, heavy and cold and formidable, a losing battle. You let it drown you. It already feels familiar. The weight of it crushes your chest and forces the air from your lungs, leaving you breathless. If you cared – if you wanted to – you could fight for air. You don’t. The inn you’re staying in is full of ghosts and wandering souls, and you feel like joining them. You, Magnus Burnsides, don’t feel like _you_ anymore. Julia was the glue that held you together, the woman who turned you from a man looking for a fight into a man striving to do good. A man who had a place to belong. A man with a family. A man who wanted a family of his own. You never got that.

It isn’t fair. It’s cruel. It’s not that you didn’t deserve this – you haven’t always been a saint, you’re sure there are things you’ve done that are punishable – it’s that she didn’t deserve this. Steven didn’t deserve this, either. The Waxmen family. The kindest people you ever met. Steven was a mentor turned father, and under his wing you grew to be more than just a folk hero, you grew to be sincere and calmer and kinder and better. And Julia – her smile changed your world for good. Her shining brown eyes and echoing laughter and her love for you made you new, made you whole, made you _happy._ She was summer skies and starry nights and the glow of an amber sunset. She was home. She was yours, and you were hers.

The past tense of that thought is enough to break you. It seems simple and black and white. You will never be whole again.

-

Sometimes you have to strain to remember the details.

Years have left your memory faded, the ink smudged despite the writing being legible. The thought scares you. One day, you may not remember her voice. You may not remember the facts about her, all the minute details that made her perfect. The birthmark on her left shoulder. The freckles dotted across her skin. The cherry red lipstick she left staining your cheeks. The way in which your name sounded infinity better coming from her lips. The scar on her thumb. The beauty mark under her eye. The pitch of her laughter.

Julia is dead – but you cannot let her die. Losing her means to lose yourself. Each memory that fades, even slightly, leaves you less and less of a person. Julia is intertwined with you, you know that you cannot lose her. You cannot forget your first date or any of the hundreds that came after that. You cannot forget anything. The memory of your wedding is as precious to you as a memory of sharing coffee with her on a random Monday morning.

A part of you thinks that forcing yourself to remember is just prolonging the pain. Each day still hurts like a dagger, a deep ache that resides in your bones, your blood, your soul; something that cannot be reached or healed. Each memory aches. Life feels as if it is at a standstill in which you daren’t move on. You’re barricaded from the world, in your own pocket dimension, one that you don’t share. Your grief is your own, and it is your weight to bear.

Sometimes you think that you’d rather live with the grief than heal.

Sometimes you begin to wonder who you’d be if you let yourself heal. When all you were fell victim to the wreckage, you have to wonder – who would you become if time could fix your wounds?

-

You never had a funeral for her. There was no body to bury. The few surviving items of the attack on your home were largely of little use to you – you only kept a few things. Miraculously, Julia’s wedding ring survived. You keep it on a chain around your neck and let it rest on your heart. It’s where it belongs. As long as you have that, it feels as if Julia is with you.

You wonder if a funeral would have helped you heal.

But then you think about funerals. How can you sum up a life in a matter of words imprinted on stone? How can you show the grief you feel through flowers? How can kind words wash this away?

Funerals are never for the dead. They’re for the living. They’re a way of coping with the loss.

You wonder if you really belong with the living.

You wonder if a place in which Julia was buried would turn into the closest thing you could have to a home.

-

When you find a home and a family, it is not what you expect. It is an elf and a dwarf. It is a secret organisation and a woman wise beyond her years in a way that hurts. It is a boy detective and a voidfish and a musician and a scientist and a dragonborn and an orc and it is wonderful and they are yours.

The guilt remains.

Home does not feel as if it should belong to you. Greif and guilt have become inseparable and co-dependant within you – they are intertwined like roots into the earth and vines climbing up a wall. You shouldn’t move on, you can’t move on, you don’t deserve to move on, it’s a betrayal and it is wrong and it would make you irredeemable. Logically, it’s bullshit. You know that. You know Julia. You know the love of your life, and you know she wants you to be happy.

You do not allow yourself that kindness.

You were never as good of a person as her.

The thought of home terrifies you to your core. Nightmares of the one you once had still haunt you. Memories and flashbacks like a punch to the gut strike when you see the people around you. You could lose them at any point. You could be alone again. You don’t want that.

You don’t know what you’d do if you lost yet another home.

You think life’s cruel irony would allow you this. Allow you safety. Allow you comfort. Allow you joy. Allow you _something_ in the mess and chaos that has been the last five years. Allow you family. Allow you peace.

The concept of that feels painfully abstract to you these days.

-

_“Why do you always buy me flowers?” You ask. “Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”_

_She laughs like summer’s rain and autumn’s leaves and winter’s first snowfall and spring’s new life. “No, silly,” she says, shaking her head. Curly amber hair bounces with a life of its own. “Anyone can buy anyone flowers. Don’t be like_ that _about it.”_

 _“Fine,” you scoff. “But that doesn’t answer my question. Why_ do _you buy them? Always yellow tulips, too.”_

_“I buy them because they’re pretty!” You raise an eyebrow at her pointedly and her returned smile sends arrows straight into your heart. “And because my mother used to buy them for me. She told me they reminded her of love.”_

_“I thought love was red?”_

_“So did I. She explained it differently to me, though. She thought yellow for love because yellow is bright. Yellow is the crayon little children use for the sun. Yellow is happiness and joy and everything good. Yellow is life – and what the hell would life be without love in it, too?_ That’s _why yellow is love. And that’s why I buy them for you, Magnus. Because your workplace is horribly dull without them and because I love you.”_

_You look at her. You’re stunned. It isn’t often you find yourself at a loss for words._

_“Well.” You laugh. You kiss her. She tastes like sugar and strawberries and her hands, dwarfed in comparison to yours, weave magic through your hair and into your blood and into your soul and into your heart and, and, and –_

_“I love you, Jules.”_

_It’s as simple as that._

-

Your wedding is overwhelmingly yellow.

You tuck a yellow tulip behind your ear as you dance with her and the world around you fades into silence, into nothingness, into irrelevance.

She smiles at you.

Yellow tulips are your favourite flower. Yellow is her favourite colour.

Your favourite colour is the gold speckled brown of her eyes.

To you, those eyes mean love and life and joy and happiness far more than a flower could ever represent.

-

There is a small allotment of garden in the bureau that has been given to you. The summer air is warm against your skin and the area is quieter than usual, the hum of chatter from bureau employees a distant sound that comforts you and keeps you grounded. Lucretia gave you this place, but it isn’t just her you have to thank. It’s Taako and Merle. It took you a long time to knock down walls. They fell with a shattering and a crumbling and a breaking that was long overdue.

But the breaking was met by family.

Family with arms outstretched.

The soil, healthy and alive and beautifully real in such an artificial place, is home to something wonderful. Yellow tulips. This garden is not only yours – it is Julia’s. You know where her soul rests. You know someone who can talk to her and see her. It took a long while for the jealousy and bitterness of that to fade before you realised what a gift that is. And now that your eyes have opened, you see that it is life’s way of making things equal. You know Julia is at peace.

Kravitz has told you that Julia only wants the same for you now, too.

You feel her here; her presence feels as old as time and like a new beginning wrapped up into one. It’s suffocating and it’s made of tidal waves, but for the first time in years, you feel as if you can breathe. You hear a cackle of Merle and Taako’s laughter in the background and your heart aches with a pang of love stronger than one you’ve felt in years. You know that this is your home now, and these people belong to you. Just as you belong to them.

That doesn’t mean you lose Julia. It doesn’t mean you love her less. It doesn’t mean you stop hurting for her or missing her or mourning her.

It just means that you allow yourself to love again.

You are Magnus Burnsides. You are the man Julia made you to be – you want to do good. You want to love. Time has come for you to let yourself do that. Time has come for love to come flooding into you like rain after a drought. It is time for your soul to be made of yellow tulips.

You take a deep breath as you remove the necklace from around your neck and lay it on the soil next to the sign reading **WAXMEN’S GARDEN**. It doesn’t feel like a betrayal. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t destroy you. You close your eyes as you rest your hand over the necklace, as you pick the ring up and run your thumb across the inscription on it, as you trace the pattern that you know like the back of your hand.

You know that you will always miss Julia – this isn’t a redemption. This isn’t the pain going away. This isn’t erasing the hurt and the loneliness and the longing. This is untangling the grief and the guilt and the pain. This is fixing the love and allowing it to re-enter your heart and your world and your life. This is living with the pain instead of dwelling within it. This is thanking the grief – after all, it changed you, it made you stronger and wiser and kinder, in some ways. This is saying goodbye to it like an old friend.

This is, inevitably, undoubtedly, and eternally, for Julia.


End file.
